A Huntington Beach police car burns after being set on fire during the Op Pro Surf riots, Sunday, August 31, 1986.

An unidentified youth jumps on top of a lifeguard vehicle while holding a flare in his hand as a Huntington Beach police car sits upside-down in the background during the Op Pro Surf riots in Huntington Beach, Sunday, August 31, 1986.

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Huntington Beach riot police with an alleged rioter under arrest during the Op Pro Surf riots in Huntington Beach, August 31, 1986.

Several plate glass windows were broken at the lifeguard station near the Huntington Beach pier during the rioting. Damaged vehicles were towed away and the windows boarded up when this photo was shot, September 1, 1986.

Young men and women wave their arms as they have their picture taken next to a burning lifeguard vehicle by a man with a camera, upper left, Sunday August 31, 1986 in Huntington Beach. In the background, a Huntington Beach police car lays upside down. Unruly beachgoers tore off several young women's bikini tops, then turned on police who came to the women's rescue, pelting the officers with bottles and torching six emergency vehicles.

What started the 1986 Huntington Beach riot is still up for debate but it seems many can agree it definitely had something to do with breasts, alcohol and over-promotion of the surfing event.

Although the catalyst for the violent mob is up for interpretation the result was the same – total chaos.

Burning cop cars, a destroyed lifeguard headquarters, women being grabbed and bouts of violence cropping up behind the stands are what those who were there remember about the 1986 OP Pro Surf Contest.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Huntington Beach surf riots and some say that infamous day still serves as an important lesson for the city’s surf community.

No longer would the surfing event be held on Labor Day weekend, and booze was no longer allowed at the event. There’s more security, and the city has been overly cautious on how the event, now called the U.S. Open of Surfing, is marketed.

THE RIOT

Marine Safety Officer Matt Karl was on the beach Aug. 31, 1986. That year, the surfing contest was being promoted by MTV and crowds were larger than normal, he said.

There have been reports on the Internet from those who say they were there that sunbathing girls showing too much skin prompted the riot; others say a competitor in the bikini competition being man-handled as she walked to the bathroom was the beginning.

Karl said the version he heard involved some young women flashing their breaststo some drunken men.

“That turned in to guys actually grabbing girls and ripping their tops off,” he said. “The police tried to escort these girls out of the crowd and as they were trying to get these girls to safety, the crowd started yelling and throwing stuff at the cops.”

Karl was off-duty that day but when violence started to break out, he jumped into Tower 3 to help relay information to police.

From the tower, he watched as the crowd morphed from partying beachgoers into crazed vandals.

He recalls seeing people looting and some men ripping apart metal handrails and using the pieces to bust out the windows of the lifeguard headquarters.

Rioters turned over cop cars and set them on fire. One man tried to climb the lifeguard headquarters with a lit flare in his hand, apparently trying to make his way to a broken window to set the building on fire, Karl said.

It was about 40 minutes before police arrived in riot gear to disperse the crowd.

“You kind of just wonder, why are people doing this?” Karl said. “It was really a surreal kind of scene.”

Behind the grandstands it was quickly evolving into a frenzied mess, and on the beach, Ian Cairns said he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

The event director of the OP Pro had one eye on the finals of the surf contest down in the water and the other on the cop cars going up in flames near the lifeguard headquarters.

“People don’t go to the beach to riot, they go to the beach to have a good time,” said Cairns, now head of the PacSun USA Surf Team.

In the water, the final was going down with Glen Winton and Mark Occhilupo – who were competing for the best of three heats. Occhilupo won the first two. But rather than have the crowds on the beach disperse into the madness, Cairns asked the surfers to paddle out in one more heat, to keep away from the rioting on the other side of the bleachers.

“We asked them if they’d be cool with going back in the heat, and hopefully everything would blow over,” Cairns recalled. “It didn’t change history, but we held the kids and crowds and they were able to stay out of the line of fire when the riot police got there.”

Photographer John L. Lyman captured much of the violence, and many of his photos were used in news publications, including in the Orange County Register.

“The crowd saw me taking photos and decided they all wanted to be in the photos and surged toward me in an effort to get in the photos,” he wrote in an email. “It got a little scary for me with the crowd rushing me like that so I ducked into the crowd, worked my way through, across the service road and onto the beach for a different angle of the crowd.”

Lyman was nearly arrested when police stormed the crowd. He flashed his press badge but it didn’t hold any clout.

“He didn’t care about that at all and threw me into the sand,” he wrote about a police officer.

Lyman escaped handcuffs when a rioter chucked a glass bottle at the officer and it shattered on his helmet. Police chased the rioter and Lyman continued to document the violence.

THE LESSON

That day in 1986 changed the course of Huntington’s big surf contest and for years the scars of the riot plagued the city.

Karl said video footage of the riot is still used today for Huntington Beach lifeguards to show them the effects of crowd mentality and how to react in such situations.

But the possibility of another 1986 riot is still there. Even this year’s U.S. Open was dangerously close to turning ugly, Karl said.

“The last Saturday of the U.S. Open had a similar kind of build up,” he said. “Some people over here were pretty worried and not really happy with how big and crazy and how close to chaos it got.”

Karl said because of increased police presence, public safety officials were able to keep the massive crowd from turning into a violent mob.

“We lucked out. It turned out to be a great event,” he said.

Next year, he added, some things are expected to be scaled down to avoid any public safety issues.

Laylan Connelly started as a journalist in 2002 after earning a degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. Through the years, she has covered several cities for The Orange County Register, starting as a beat reporter in Irvine before focusing on coastal cities such as Newport Beach, Dana Point and Laguna Beach. In 2007, she was selected for a prestigious Knight New Media fellowship focusing on digital media at UC Berkeley, where she learned skills to adapt to the ever-changing online landscape. Using a web-based approach, she turned her love for the ocean into a full-time gig as the paper’s beaches reporter. The unique beat allows her to delve into coastal culture by covering everything from the countless events dotting the 42 miles of coastline, to the business climate of the surf industry, to the fascinating wildlife that shows up on the shores. Most importantly, she takes pride in telling stories of the people who make the beaches so special, whether they are surfers using the ocean to heal, or the founders of major surf brands who helped spawn an entire culture, or people who tirelessly fight to keep the coast pristine and open for all to enjoy. She’s a world traveler who loves to explore the slopes during winter months or exotic surf spots around the globe. When she’s not working, or maybe while she's researching a story, you can find her longboarding at her favorite surf spots at San Onofre or Doheny.

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